Selected Essays | Julian Lucas on Jorge Luis Borges

On this episode of Selected Essays, Jess and Zach talk to Julian Lucas about his essay “Welcome to Armageddon,” published in Cabinet in 2017, and Jorge Luis Borges’s “The Enigma of Edward FitzGerald,” which was written in 1951.

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Transcript

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Jessica Swoboda  00:05

Hey everyone, welcome to Selected Essays, a podcast series from The Point magazine about essays you should read but probably haven't. Each episode will be talking with writers about an essay that's influenced one of their own. My name is Jess Swoboda, and I'm here with my cohost, Zach Fine. 

Zach Fine  00:23

This week, we spoke to Julian Lucas about Jorge Luis Borges’s essay, "The Enigma of Edward Fitzgerald," which was written in 1951. We also talked to Julian about an essay of his that was published in Cabinet magazine in 2017 called "Welcome to Armageddon." Julian is a staff writer at the New Yorker, and writes about everything from art and literature to music and video games. He also used to be an editor at The Point, and so Jess and I were thrilled to have him back to join us. 

Jessica Swoboda  00:50

We hope you'll enjoy this episode and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. If you have questions, comments or anything else, send an email to selectedessays@thepointmag.com. We'd love to hear from you. And also be sure to subscribe to The Point, the magazine that brings you content like this podcast. You can find a 50% off discount code exclusive to listeners and the episode notes.

Zach Fine  01:23

Hey, Julian, thanks so much for joining us.

Julian Lucas  01:25

Of course, thanks for having me. 

Zach Fine  01:27

Just to get started, can you tell us a little bit about Borges's life as it relates to this essay? 

Julian Lucas  01:33

So I should say, first, I'm not a huge expert on Borges, but one of the towering figures of 20th century literature. He was born in 1899 in Argentina, and he's generally seen as both a bridge figure between modernism and postmodernism and one of the kind of founding writers of postmodern metafiction. He was a poet, essayist and a writer of short stories. And he's best known for these very short, dense short stories about philosophical and metaphysical problems. He also wrote kind of Frontier tales about Argentine bandits and gauchos, those stories are a little less well known, but, but he's best known for these kind of metaphysical tales, which are really about the nature of literature, the nature of time and history. Some of the more favorite famous are the Library of Babel, which is about a kind of infinite library, and the problems that it might pose to readers and scholars, or a very short story called "On Exactitude in Science," which sort of has as its anchoring idea a map that is the same size as the territory it covers and that kind of aspiration, and a lot of philosophers have taken up that idea. And so he's kind of in the same generation as figures like Vladimir Nabokov and Italo Calvino, and has had a huge, huge influence on on literature ever since. And one of the things he's famous for is short stories, which are quite close to his literary essays in that he wrote a lot of short literary essays, often that first appeared in magazines and newspapers, that were about famous writers or famous historical figures, theologians, poets, et cetera, where he would write about their lives with such compression and choosing details so carefully that it's almost as though he was constructing a kind of parable from their lives and All of and in his essays, often, all of the information about whoever he happens to be writing about is historically true, but at the same time, the way that he picks details, gives the story a kind of fantastical sense, and he's very interested in chance correspondences between events in the lives of disparate figures. He's been a big influence on writers like well, first he was he was a big influence on the Latin American boom of the late 20th century and in contemporary literature. Two people I can think of who write like him are one of his translators, Eliot Weinberger, great essayist who also writes stories and essays which are about historical figures, but which take a degree of just by the selection of details, kind of making these into sort of fabulous constructions. Yes, and then maybe some of your listeners would have read Benjamin Labatut's work and the way that he's written about great scientists of the twentieth century and the relationship between madness and discovery. So a lot of Borges's works are in the form of kind of literary forgeries, as in, he takes the form of, say, a book review or a diary entry or a section from a fictional treatise, and sort of imitates it. And he and actually essays are sort of the way that he began writing fiction.

Jessica Swoboda  05:41

So in this essay, "The Enigma of Edward FitzGerald," there seems to be a few different relationships that we need to get a handle on as a way to understand what's going on in this essay. So Borges and FitzGerald, Borges, and how do I pronounce the Persian poet's name?

Julian Lucas  05:58

Omar Khayyam. 

Jessica Swoboda  05:59

Khayyam. So Omar Khayyam, and then FitzGerald and Khayyam, and then also Borges and Persian literature as well. And so can we talk a bit about these different relationships as a way into discussing what this essay is about?

Julian Lucas  06:15

Sure, in fact, maybe the best way would be to just introduce Omar Khayyam and The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam. So Omar Khayyam was a Persian poet of the 20th century. He was actually better known as a mathematician, and made some important advances in algebra. He was a jurist, and he was actually not a very famous poet in the Persian context. He wrote several dozen quatrains of a form known as rubaii in Persian which some of which were celebrated. But he's not considered one of the greatest poets in the Persian tradition. However, he had a revival in the mid 19th century, when a Victorian poet and Orientalist in England, Edward FitzGerald, basically read his work and experimented with translating it, and he took essentially a collection of different quatrains that Omar Khayyam had written 700 years earlier, and he arranged it into a cycle of poems, 100 different quatrains, which he called the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam. It's one of these instances of translation where it's hard to say where translation ends and the writing of a new poem begins. He took essentially these poems that had not been put together in the past, and he gave them an order, and he published it in the in the mid 1800s and ironically, even though Khayyam had not been one of the major poets in the Persian traditions, and also FitzGerald was not necessarily a noteworthy poet in terms of his original writing in English, the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam became a sensation. It really was a literally a literary bestseller of the late nineteenth century. There were clubs devoted to reading it Khayyam clubs across Europe and the United States, soldiers actually read it in the trenches during World War One. It was one of the most commonly read books at that time, and the themes of the poem are essentially mortality and the uncertainty of being remembered, one's words and deeds being remembered in the future, and also wine and intoxication. So kind of classic themes for poetry. Many lines from FitzGerald's translation of the poem have gone on to be very famous in the English literary context. So the most famous quatrain is probably "the moving finger writes and having writ moves on, neither your piety nor wit can lure it back to cancel half a line, nor all your tears wash out a word of it." And Agatha Christie took the moving finger as a title for one of her novels. It's inspired artworks, music, which I'd like to talk about a little bit later. But essentially what was kind of remarkable about its publication is that this minor poet from the medieval era in Persia, through the help of a minor English poet and translator of the Victorian era, became a canonical work of English literature. It's kind of an extraordinary story of chance happenings, and this is what made it so interesting to Jorge Luis Borges, who so much, so much of his work is about the strange transmigrations that happen throughout history, the ways that influence travels in unpredictable ways. He was interested in the meta, meta, various metaphysical systems from a lot of different religions, and the way they conceived of the soul and of reincarnation. And so both because he loved the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, but also because of this extraordinary story of its translation, he wrote a short essay about it in 1951 called “The Enigma of Edward FitzGerald.”

Zach Fine  11:02

Just to give us a sense of the essay, can you read the opening of it for us?

Julian Lucas  11:09

Sure. "A man, Omar Ben Ibrahim, is born in Persia in the 11th century of the Christian era. That century was for him, the fifth of the hijira. He studies the Quran and its traditions with Hassan Ben Saba, the future founder of the sect of the hashishin or assassins, and with Nizam Al Mulk, who will become the vizier of ALP Arslan and the conqueror of the Caucasus. The three friends, half in jest, swear that if fortune someday favors one of them, the luckiest will not forget the others. After a number of years, Nizam attains the position of a vizier. Omar asks only for a corner in the shade of this good fortune where he may pray for his friend's prosperity and think about mathematics." So it's a it's a very informational beginning, and it starts with the poet and and two of his friends. And just to give a sense of the way that Borges compresses biography to create a sense of kind of inevitability, a sense of destiny, there's a certain irony in the fact that of these three friends, Khayyam is the one who is not interested in some great position. One of them goes on to become a powerful political leader. The other goes on to import to found an important religious sect and and he just wants to sit in the shade and study mathematics. And yet, 1000 years later, his is the name that that we still know and and this kind of setup, you know, these are all real historical figures, but the way that Borges is writing about it, it's almost like a parable or a fairy tale, because the way that they all meet and almost make this bargain about their futures gives a sense of of irony in in what is to become payams literary destiny. Yeah, because I was wondering how you might characterize this essay and some of what you were saying there may gesture in that direction, but because the way it begins almost feels like I'm about to read one of Borges's short stories rather than one of his essays. Yes, I mean, so the way that he began writing short stories was through writing essays. He had a certain timidity about writing. He admired some of the his great modern, modernist, near precess predecessors, like James Joyce, for instance. But he had a kind of almost, because of his great erudition, he had this anxiety about writing a big, imaginative work. And so the way that he started was, you know, he was a critic and an essayist who wrote for various Argentine magazines. And so he he sort of just started inventing in the modes that he already wrote in as as an essayist. And you can see that, you can see that beginning even in a non fiction essay like this one, because there's a certain level of compression when you're telling the story of someone's life, where the selection of details, because there are so few of them, and because you're reducing a life to almost a kind of sonnet that you are, you're creating a sort of constellation just in the selection of details that you take. And so the first half of the essay is the life of Omar Khayyam, which, you know, he becomes a an important mathematician, and he writes poetry, but never really flourishes as a poet. And I just, I want to read the end of that first paragraph, which, just to give a sense of the transition he makes. So "in the year 517 of the hijira, Omar is reading a treatise titled "The one and the many," an uneasiness or a premonition interrupts him." I'll skip ahead. "He dies that same day at the hour of Sunset around that time, on an island to the north and west that is unknown to the cartographers of Islam, a Saxon king who defeated a King of Norway is defeated by a Norman Duke." And so what Borges is gesturing to here is the Norman conquest of England, kind of just offhandedly, because making the point that when this poet dies, the nation where his future translator and the reviver of his legacy will be born and do His work doesn't even properly exist yet, or one of the pivotal elements in its birth is just happening at that point, and it's part of the way that throughout the essay, he emphasizes at every moment the remarkable number of chance events and contingencies that had to happen for this literary work, Fitzgerald's translation, to to exist.

Zach Fine  16:23

Yeah, the first time I read the essay, I almost thought there was kind of a buried philosophy of history kind of baked into it the way that he was playing with chance and coincidence. But one thing I was curious about is that, from what I understand, the essay has a kind of strange, strange relationship to fact, that some of the scholars who've written about it since have said that Khayyam probably wasn't an atheist, that he probably didn't write less than five hundred quatrains, that he wasn't childhood friends with Hassan Al Sabah, that he didn't die around 1066 and so by the time you kind of collect all of these scholarly kind of puncturings, there's almost very little in the essay that holds up as historically accurate. But I'm wondering, if you think Borges would think that that scholarly criticism kind of misses the point of his essay, and if so, why?

Julian Lucas  17:10

I don't think he would necessarily. I that probably has more to do with the quality of the sources that he was consulting at the time. You know, I assume that he was mostly consulting, you know, European Orientalist sources that were available to him in Argentina in 1951 and that, as there's probably been more scholarship available in Spanish and English since that time and and I can't say that I'm familiar with exactly which parts of the essay are not true, but I think the the overall conceit of the essay just that this was a minor poet, and that the rediscovery of his work by another minor poet, and it becoming a text that entered into the canon of English literature is is still fairly remarkable, though I'd be, I'd be very interested if you could, you could tell me which, which particular details scholars have kind of poked holes in. 

Zach Fine  18:20

And I know very little about this. I want to be clear. I think I was just curious if there was a kind of playing with myth and a kind of resistance to fact at some level that maybe Borges was interested in. But I'm also curious about, I wanted to ask about a question of style, which is that the essay ranges over many centuries, from the eleventh to the nineteenth, but the whole thing is written in the present tense. And I'm wondering how you think that stylistic choice kind of services or has its aims in the essay?

Julian Lucas  18:49

Absolutely, that's that's a great thing to pick up on. I mean, I think one thing that it does is it gives a sense of decisions being made in the present tense, which I think it reminds us that whereas the past tense has obviously a very finished quality, everything has been written in stone already. The present tense returns us to the moment of decision in a certain sense. And so when we read "Omar asks only for a corner in the shade of this good fortune," we think of the fact that he might have asked his friend who became the Vizier. Well, no, I want to have an important position in your administration. He might have chosen to become a warrior rather than a poet. And we actually read in the next sentence that one of his friends ends up being killed by the other at a later point and and so we have a sense of of certain decisions being made and and of the simultaneity of of certain events which will seem to be disparate, such as the norm and conquest of England and and Khayyam's death, but then will turn out to be intertwined at a much, much later time. There's also a kind of metaphysical subtext to this tense choice, which is so throughout his accounts of Khayyam's life and FitzGerald's life, Borges talks about basic philosophical monism, the idea that the whole world is sort of one substance. And he he writes about the fact that Khayyam likely read the Neoplatonic philosophers and and behind this idea of this extraordinary collaboration over the centuries and on different continents, is, is this idea of of reincarnation and simultaneity, which Borges kind of puckishly, it's the basis for the essay this, this belief in in the transmigration of souls and of reincarnation. But he there's also a certain irony in the fact that he stopped short of saying that he believes in anything metaphysical like that. He points out that Khayyam was believed by some to be an atheist. He says at one point that even if you believe it's all just coincidence, that's just as extraordinary as the sort of reincarnation story, and just for the way that he weaves this into even kind of incidental details in the story. He writes about Khayyam, "He is an atheist, but knows how to interpret in Orthodox style the most difficult passages of the Quran. For every educated man is a theologian, and faith is not a requisite." And and I love that line because he's he's talking about Khayyam and just stating a fact about tenth =0century Persia. But at the same time, he's talking about his own method in writing this essay. He's saying it doesn't matter if I believe in in reincarnation or, you know, philosophical monism, if I believe that Khayyam and and FitzGerald were somehow in metaphysical communion over the centuries, because you can, you can appreciate these connections. Without, faith is not a requisite, as he says, so there's a kind of playfulness about is this an extraordinary conjunction of chances, or is this what we call destiny? And the idea that these are two sides of the exact same coin that that is interesting.

Jessica Swoboda  22:38

Julian, now seems like a good time to turn to the passage you selected.

Julian Lucas  22:42

So Borges writes, "a miracle happens from the fortuitous conjunction of a Persian astronomer who condescended to write poetry and an eccentric Englishman who peruses oriental and Hispanic books, perhaps without understanding them completely, emerges an extraordinary poet who resembles neither. All collaboration is mysterious, that if the English and the Persian was even more so for the two were quite different, and perhaps in life might not have been friends. Death and the vicissitudes of time led one to know the other and make them into a single poet."

Jessica Swoboda  23:20

I really love this moment, and it's one I highlighted on my read as well, so I was really happy when I saw that you had selected it to talk about. And so why did you select this passage to discuss with us?

Julian Lucas  23:33

First, I just want to say that the essay was translated by Eliot Weinberger, who's also a fantastic essayist and quite Borgesian. I just was inspired to say that, because I think it's a beautiful translation, particularly in that passage. I mean, I think that these lines, sort of, you know, in the most the simplest answer to that question is that he just, in a very compressed way, expresses what's so extraordinary about this story in those lines, that that these two figures collaborated across traditions, across time, in a way that could easily not have happened. And he uses the word conjunction, the fortuitous conjunction, of a Persian astronomer. He returns again and again to the fact that Khayyam, in addition to being a mathematician, was an astronomer. And of course, one reason for this is that astronomers look at the stars and the way that they form constellations, which, of course, are not real things, but just tricks of perspective. You know, from where we stand, we see that these certain, these stars, which, which might be in very different regions of our galaxy, look like, they form a particular shape, but from any other vantage, they would not and and it's kind of an extraordinary contingency that we can see these shapes and Borges is implicitly drawing a connection between Khayyam's work as an astronomer and the translation that that occurs between these two figures. I also just love this idea of a collaboration, not just between two people who are not like each other, but that the work that results from their collaboration also is not like them. Borges makes clear in the essay that there's there's a kind of melancholy romanticism to FitzGerald's translation, which Khayyam, who was, you know, a serious man of science, I believe he also was, you know, served in government, may not have identified with and in the same way, basically, this idea of a sort of composite figure, which is, is like neither of the its two constituents, is very appealing to me. And again, just this idea that it might not have happened, which I think that Borges returns to again and again, just through the way that he describes each figure's biography.

Zach Fine  26:22

To just develop that idea of a composite figure a little bit more and the fortuitous conjunction, the phrase that Borges uses, I'm wondering if he's making an argument about translation and or literary influence here, about the idea that maybe there aren't discrete authors in time, but as you're saying, a kind of composite figure. Do you think there is a kind of argument being made about how we should think about literary influence?

Julian Lucas  26:48

Oh, definitely. So Borges was very skeptical of reading literary works in terms of the personalities of their authors. He actually has an early essay, which I believe is called "On the Nonexistence of Personality." And it's clear that he likes to locate the agency when it comes to the creation of a literary work almost in the force of of a tradition or or in the the force of of he's an idealist in the philosophical sense, in that it is the the ideas and the works themselves that have the agency and and the the actual writers who are creating these works become sort of vessels or responsive instruments that put these works that exist outside of them together in novel ways. 

Zach Fine  27:51

I'm also wondering if you could say a bit about the criticism of FitzGerald as an Orientalist. I don't know if he was a self avowed orientalist, but that, you know, we hear Borges, and I think in another essay, he praises FitzGerald for the anglicization of Omar. And I'm wondering how Borges would respond to a kind of contemporary criticism of FitzGerald as an orientalist, and the way that we hear that term now? 

Julian Lucas  28:18

Right. So, of course, the term Orientalist, but you know, before Edward Said's book just referred to a field of study. It was, you know what Western scholars called studying this, this nebulously defined East, whether it was China or Japan or Iran, as the case may be so. And obviously there was a there was a both a lack of complete understanding of of the culture he was translating from, and also an imposition of in FitzGerald's case of his own, the concerns of his own literary context, into this work, even as he presents it as a kind of authentic work. I think Borges would respond to this, though, by saying that what's interesting about the poem is that it's yes, there's a lot to criticize about it. If you take Edward FitzGerald's translation and you try to discuss it as though this is like the authentic representation of medieval Iranian literature or of Khayyam philosophy about the world, I think because he doesn't start from that standpoint, though there's a lot less to criticize. In fact, the lack of understanding itself. I think Borges is part of what makes the story so compelling. It's not that FitzGerald, even though he was separated by cultures and centuries from from Khayyam, was able to channel the truth of his work. It's that he he did not fully understand it, but something about it struck him and inspired him to create something new that he wouldn't have been able to create on his own, and then ultimately ended up being more celebrated and more influential than either writer's work on its own.

Jessica Swoboda  30:19

I feel like before we transition to your essay, we have to talk about the title of this one. So what is the enigma of Edward FitzGerald? What would you say?

Julian Lucas  30:29

The enigma is the existence of this work, which Borges is kind enough not to say it too strongly, but which is obviously way beyond the capacities of what this writer did in their other works. We wouldn't, we wouldn't remember Edward FitzGerald, were it not for the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam. And yet, at the same time, it's, it's, you know, one of the great works of nineteenth-century English poetry, and he almost seizes on the story as a kind of implicit refutation of the idea of, you know, romantic genius, that you know, it might not necessarily be the strength of one individual person's talent or the strength of their personality that makes for a great writer. It can also just be a certain conjunction of of texts that a writer brings into being at a particular time, which, of course, is a very postmodern notion. You know the the author as as scripter, as as Foucault later put it. And you know, this is, I think this is one reason that Borges is a founding figure in that movement and wife. This story is a kind of perfect, a paradigmatic story for that notion of authorship and literary creation.

Jessica Swoboda  32:04

So you chose your essay, "Welcome to Armageddon" to pair with "The Enigma of Edward FitzGerald." So can you tell us a bit about your essay, and to what extent this one we've been talking about influenced it?

Julian Lucas  32:18

Right. So they're not necessarily. I didn't actually think of this Borges essay when when I wrote, "Welcome to our Armageddon." But I'll back up and describe the essay. So when I was in high school, I played an online text-based game called "Armageddon Mud." And for those who are who aren't familiar with a "mud," it stands for "multi-user dungeon," and it's the predecessor to online games such as "World of Warcraft," "Eve Online," these kind of huge persistent realities where 1000s of players come together and kind of shape a reality together. So "Armageddon Mud" was very, very early version of this type of game, and it had some very distinct features. So it was what's called a role playing game, meaning that you are kind of method acting your character through the through the screen and through your keyboard. Everyone creates a character. They describe what their character looks like in words, and you describe your character's actions as you move through the world of the game, which is also entirely textual. And one thing that distinguished "Armageddon Mud" from other games of its type is that this role playing was very, very serious. You were expected to devote a serious amount of energy to describing your character, to coming up with a consistent personality for them, for the way that they spoke, for their motivations, and basically to collaboratively create stories with other players and their characters. So the game is set in this desert fantasy world called Zilanthus, where there are two rival city states. Life is very harsh. A vast desert separates these two cities and basically everyone in the game creates their story, tries to survive, and the narrative unfolds through a kind of combination of free choice among the players, but there's also random chance you can be you can be killed, for example, by A creature in the desert or by another character who decides to stab you in the back. And this brings me to the second distinguishing feature of the game, which is that it has what's called permanent death. So in most games, when you die, you have multiple lives. You come back. It's not a huge deal to die. Die in most video games. Armageddon Mud is kind of just the opposite, when when you die, your character is gone forever. And this is, this is actually outside of your control. As I said, before you can be killed, you can you can fall into a hole. You can die of thirst or starvation, because you get lost. It's actually somewhat hard to survive in the game. And because people put so much effort into creating their characters, into building relationships with other characters, sometimes people would play as their characters for multiple months or even years, only to lose them suddenly one day and and so there was a certain gravity to the way you enact your characters stories, because it's, it's even though it is a game, it's sort of, it's not a game. And, you know, playing this game when I was in early high school was kind of formative for me, because I played a poet in the game. There was actually a kind of guild of bards who would sometimes attach themselves to nobles of the different city states. And needless to say, the standard of writing was not super, super high, and I would be embarrassed to share these poems, but just by having a sense of meter and rhyme and kind of some of the elementary forms of genres of English poetry, I was able to become a somewhat noteworthy poet in the fictional world, and that was one of the different characters I played. And I wanted to write an essay about my experience in this game, because it struck me that the what the game did very well, and why I found it to be very powerful esthetically, is it highlighted what I see as one of the fundamental features of computer games as a genre as a medium, which is that they can actually force You to make choices which involve real contingency and have unpredictable consequences. And so you know, if you're reading a novel or reading an essay or watching a film, writers and filmmakers can create an illusion of contingency, and often work very hard to create illusions of contingency, but it's not. It's not real. The text before you is fixed, and you can interpret it as you like. You can bring what you want to it, but really you're you don't have actual contingency and and to me, what, what is interesting about computer games is that a narrative can be created in a way that is actually contingent, even though it also involves choice and authorship. And to me, this was really certain things could happen in the game where you would appreciate what happened in the way that you would appreciate some kind of chance event in in life. Because in a certain way, it's not constructed. You know when that when there's a you might admire in a novel, a sort of extraordinary parallel between two narratives, but you also know that the author has created this parallel, or in the case of an essayist who's writing about historical figures that they've they've constructed this parallel by selecting certain details in someone's life. But in a game, something actually can happen that feels sort of miraculous, because you know that chance was involved in it happening, and this happened to me through an object in the game. So one of my many incarnations in "Armageddon Mud" was a merchant who also carved certain trade goods, and I made a certain ivory pipe that had a map of the world on it, and I wrote a very purple description of what this ivory pipe was supposed to look like. I was very proud of myself. I must have been a sophomore in high school, and I created this object, and my character sold it to another character, then that character died, and I played several other characters. And it was actually more than a year later, when I was playing this poet, that I came across the pipe again, and it was in the possession of this nobleman who I worked for. And it was fascinating to me, because I had no idea how this pipe that I had created had come into this character's possession. It had it had essentially dropped off the map for me after I had stopped playing the character who had created it, and yet I knew it had been involved in all of these different stories in the game's world, in fact, the nobleman who owned it told me that he had found it on the corpse of another character, and I was wondering, Well, how did that person get it? And so it kind of just brought home for me the extraordinary possibility for. The emergent narrative that computer games have, even though, I think, because of the sort of commercial imperatives of video game making as a field, I don't think it's been explored artistically as much as as it should be, the connection to Borges, for me is, is just that in his essays and in his stories, I see the same love of contingency and of the way that narratives can intersect in in a way that if you had just made a slightly different choice, if if Something had gone a slightly different way, whether historically or in a particular artist's life, that none of this would have happened and and even in the way that he writes his essays, on the sentence level, there is this emphasis on on what could have been, and on the contingent nature of the story that he's he's telling, and so so in the reappearance of that pipe in this game I played, it did make me think of the way that texts sort of migrate through time and and the story of The Rubaiyat, which actually, and I should add that The Rubaiyat has had a very Interesting afterlife beyond even the story that Borges tells about it, in which I've continued writing on.

Zach Fine  41:27

One thing that we've been thinking a little bit about in this podcast is about where essays are published, and they're kind of afterlives and different books and cabinet where your essay was published in a publication I've loved for many years, one of my favorite publications, and I'm kind of curious about the writing of the essay, and Cabinet as a venue, as a home for it, about whether Cabinet was kind of the ideal place for it, and what the kind of editing process looked like?

Julian Lucas  41:54

I think Cabinet absolutely was an ideal place for it, and I actually, so Cabinet is a magazine. It's the first place that I worked as a writer and editor, and it's a magazine that actually has a very Borgesian spirit in that Cabinet specializes in essays that look at marginal stories, as in, not the main event historically, and tries to very playfully find what philosophical lessons can can be drawn from them. And so I had a kind of intellectual question that was somewhat serious, which is the relationship between games and death and and between the possibility of death and mortality, and how that gives weight to one's decisions in life. And then also this, this form, which is seen as very trivial and silly of this kind of niche text based computer game that sort of belongs to this very, you know, early 90s, experimental beginnings of computer games, and so Cabinet sort of seemed to me like the only place that that I could publish in an essay like this at the time, where I wanted to deal with that philosophical question, but but looking at a text that was kind of weird and niche and and a little silly as well, and get into great detail about how it worked.

Jessica Swoboda  43:41

You mentioned just in the answer prior that you're doing a bit of work on The Rubaiyat. Can you tell us about the essay that you're writing on it?

Julian Lucas  43:50

Yes, so, so The Rubaiyat is just a poem that has had a lot of really fascinating afterlives. And I wanted to mention first, how I actually first encountered the Rubaiyat. It was, it was not in college or in the Norton Anthology of Literature. It was actually in a computer game that I played as a child called Titanic adventure out of time, which puts the player in in the role of a British spy on board the Titanic trying to sort of vie with a rival German spy over you know what is eventually going to be the outbreak of World War One, and the kind of great power one upsmanship going on in the world. A plot point in the game is that you you find this bejeweled copy of The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam on board the ship. And you have to, you have to take it, because it's, it's been stolen, and it's going to be used to to finance, actually, it's going to be used to finance the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand. And if you. Take it. You can, you can prevent the Serbian Black Hand organization from having the funds, essentially, to carry out this history changing assassination. And it's a completely ludicrous conceit, but the kind of funny thing about it is it's very resonant with the themes of The Rubaiyat this book, which is all about mortality and contingency, if you're able to steal it, you can prevent this great historical catastrophe from taking place. So and lines from the poem are actually strewn throughout the ship. Pages are torn from it. And so I actually was, was first exposed to the poem and even its language from from this computer game that I played as as a child. Much later, I actually learned that there was, in fact, a Bejeweled copy of The Rubaiyat on board the Titanic. It was created by this London book binder, sangorski and Sutcliffe, these two partner bookbinders. And they were the official bookbinders to the British monarchy. And they did it as a kind of showpiece of great bookbinding. So it was encrusted with, I believe, hundreds and hundreds of precious stones, and had tooled leather covers. It was actually, it was written about in newspapers and magazines, because this was a kind of just showpiece book, and it had this fascinating life, which is, it was bought by an American in Manhattan, shipped across the sea, but he didn't want to pay the customs duty on it, so it was shipped back to England. Then he felt bad that he had lost out on buying the book, and so he bid on it again, and he won, and it was shipped back on the Titanic, and so it sunk with the ship, and has never been found. And and it's, it's, it's been actually an object of interest to a lot of different writers over the years. And it there's, it's kind of fascinating, because the the themes of the of the poem, it's very much about intoxication and the enjoyment of life, and yet also the inevitability of death and being forgotten, and even the traces of your life being erased. And that's, of course, very resonant with, with the voyage of the Titanic. So I became kind of fascinated with with this story, that this book had sort of found me through this computer game when I was young that there was this real story of the way The Rubaiyat was involved in this historic tragedy. And then another part of the essay is a beautiful album by the jazz harpist Dorothy Ashby from 1970 and it's called The Rubaiyat of Dorothy Ashby. And it is a, basically, it's a setting of Edward FitzGerald's translation of The Rubaiyat to music employing a lot of different styles. Some of it is straight jazz. At other points, she's, she's playing a lot of different Eastern instruments. She she learned to play the koto and then there's also a kind of pop, Motown inflected sound to to some of the tracks as well. It's, it's, I highly recommend it to to anybody who who might be listening. But it's, it's, it's a, it's a really beautiful album, and I found that again, The Rubaiyat ended up being adapted by someone who their own life was resonant with its themes, because Ashby was really a pioneering figure in bringing the harp into jazz. She's generally credited as the person, even before the more famous Alice Coltrane, who actually learned to pioneered playing the harp in a kind of jazz mode, learned to make the harp swing and play it the way that you might play guitar, for instance, which is very difficult to do technically. And she had a kind of brief, critically acclaimed career, and then very shortly after this album came out, her career kind of collapsed. She lived in Detroit, which, after the riots it went through in the late 60s, went into a huge downturn. At the same time, jazz became no longer really commercially viable, and she actually gave up jazz and became a session harpist for a lot of pop and r&b musicians. So she famously played on a lot of Stevie Wonder songs, and then she died very young of cancer. Her. And so I just, I found it very moving that she had taken on an adaptation of this poem, which is all about the sort of the vagaries of of remembrance and and the way that one's artistic work can be lost and then found again, and then and can disappear, and that this was very resonant with her own life, as it was with kyam's life and Fitzgerald's life. So I'm trying to wrangle all of all of those stories into into a kind of an essay on the rubaiyats, different appearances in my life.

Jessica Swoboda  50:41

That's great. Yeah, and thanks so much for joining us Julian on this episode of selected essays, it's been great to talk with you. 

Julian Lucas  50:47

Thank you so much. I really, really enjoyed it.

Jessica Swoboda  50:51

Thanks everyone for joining us for this episode of selected essays. We'd like to thank John Trevaskis for editing the podcast, and Meg Duffy of Hand Habits for contributing the original music. As always, subscribe wherever you get your podcasts, and please subscribe to The Point. There's a discount code for listeners in the show notes. If you have questions, comments or anything else, send an email to selected essays@thepointmag.com We'd love to hear from you. Until next time listeners.